Thursday, November 29, 2012

I never got around to watching it. Partly, I think, I was distracted by my vexation at never being able to find any of the other volumes of the series. But mostly I was a little afraid of the tsunami of nostalgia that it might unleash in me - I was waiting for a 'special occasion' to revisit this highlight of my 1970s childhood, one of the best TV music shows ever (I've mentioned it on here before; it used to be on BBC2 on Sunday nights, after M.A.S.H.), and to wallow in the melancholy that this was likely to induce.

I finally found such an occasion a couple of months ago - and the selection did not disappoint. Well, there was a noticeable falling off in the standard of the last few entries from the 1980s (although it was nice to see the great comedy band Half Man, Half Biscuit included, with their warped childhood anecdote All I Want For Christmas Is A Dukla Prague Away Kit), but the 1970s stuff was pure gold.

Richard and Linda Thompson, I now learn, have been giants of the English folk scene for over 40 years - but they had completely passed me by. I am belatedly quite smitten with Linda; not only does she have a compelling voice, but she is here just radiantly beautiful too (the hippie headscarf notwithstanding). This performance (introduced by the notorious 'Whispering' Bob Harris, an inspiration for John Thomson's Louis Balfour character, the low-talking host of the Jazz Club segment in The Fast Show) is from early in 1975 - a year or two before I started getting into the show, I suppose.

The search for a new Drinking Companion

Leave your 'Bar Jokes' here

Leave your 'bad' jokes here

About The Blog

Every bar is a memory.
And all the memories huddle together for company, so that in my mind it often seems as though every bar I've ever been in is on the same street, or at least in the same neighbourhood; every great drinking session I fondly recall happened on one night, or over the course of one weekend; and everyone I've ever drunk with fuses into a single person, the idealised Drinking Companion.
Sometimes it seems to me also that the melancholy that infuses so many of these memories had but a single cause, an idealised Lost Love.
Some of these memories I will now try to share with the enormous, faceless, blog-munching world at large.
These, then, are the mental voyages of the boozehound Froog; his many-year mission to seek out new drinks and new places to drink them in, to write The Meaning Of Life on a napkin.... andnotlose it on the way home.

About Me

Froog is an escaped lawyer - but there is no need for alarm; he is only a danger to himself, not to the general public. An eternal wanderer, he now lives in an exotic city somewhere in the 'Third World' *, where he is held prisoner by an unfinished novel (or, more precisely, an unstarted novel). He spends a lot of time running, writing, taking photographs, and falling in love with women who fail to appreciate him. He also spends a lot of time in bars.
[* OK, I'll come clean: I've been living in Beijing since summer '02.]